Trying to Stream

[DalePenn]

For background, while I am an experienced software developer, I have not worked with video.

We are starting work on a system where one of the information sources will be a camera feeding its signal to a video encoder. We want to display the camera image in real time on apps on several machines. We plan to do this by sending the stream out multicast, and embedding VLC display widgets in the apps we are writing.

As a way of trying to crawl a little before we run (and waiting for the camera and encoder), I planned to take a video file, and stream if from one instance of the VLC media player and display on another instance. I can play the file direction in the media player, and can stream HTTP OK, but when I try to do UDP trouble starts.

To start with we are using VLC Media Player version 2.0.10. If there is a known best site to get the most current RPMs for VLC, could someone please note it ?

To try and do the stream, I stream the file (which is an MP4 file), I chose UDP(legacy) and set the address to a multicast address (224.0.10.10) and port 5000. For transcoding I created a custom profile. For encapsulation I chose MPEG-TS (based on reading that only TS was allowed with UDP), For video, I turned it on and chose H-264. I left audio and subtitles off. Finally, I turn on Stream all elementary streams, and SAP accounce with a value of test. I did not fill in the group name, and set TTL to 15.

When I attempt to stream I get the following error "no suitable sout mux module for 'udp{ttl=15}/ts://224.0.10.10:5000'. At that point I have no real idea what to do. So the follow on questions :
1) Is there a good place to describe how to set up this sort of streaming, and I missed it (I did read the wiki docs).
2) I think rtp is an option to udp (at least the encoder we plan to use supports both), but I have no idea what the MRL for that is (the help files I have seen do not show what to do for rtp).
3) The last page of the stream options I have no idea when they really apply, and what values they need to be.

As a final point, I tried the 2 RTP options (RTP/MPEG Transport Stream and RTP Audio Video Profile). The first also failed totally, while the second appeared to start streaming, although there are some error message at the very start. In that case, when I tried to start the other media player to receive the stream, I tried an MRL of udp://@224.0.10.10:5004 (the default port was 5004, so I kept it). In this case, the player shows the MRL up top,but gives a "cannot pre fill buffer" error and does not actual streaming display. Not totally sure if data is coming out of the stream source, (but the bottom slide/time display is incrementing), or if the MRL is even remotely correct.

Again, any help I can get to understand things better and get this limited example working would be of help.

Thanks,
Dale Pennington

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Sounds like the TS muxer plugin is missing in your install.